As part of our design process at the BBC we use paper prototypes. They are a useful way to quickly decide how we might prioritise certain elements in an interface and think about how we structure and present content.

In this video Nick Ritchie a designer on my team demonstrates how we prototyped the iPlayer Radio navigation.

Hey Yasser, this paper prototyping is something that I’m trying to adopt more in my current job. Couple of questions: a) How do you validate decisions as a group? and b) how do you deal with dynamic processes , like personalised options or conditional responses ?
Hope you’re good.
Tim

The best way to validate decisions as a group is to have some kind of criteria at the beginning for what the group consider as being a successful prototype.

This criteria might be based on user needs such as as being able to find a programme easily and/or business needs such as being able to promote certain types of user journeys to specific content.

You can then judge the prototype based on this criteria. In a group situation it may be helpful to rate each criteria with a score from 1-3 for example. This would help to prioritise what works and what doesn’t and stimulate discussion between the group which will then help to inform decisions.

To deal with dynamic processes, I find creating a flow diagram is really helpful. It will help you make sense of everything that needs to happen within your website or app. It’s then a useful document to refer to when you are creating your paper prototype as you can illustrate the different options in front of people and refer to the flow diagram to convey that this element of the interface changes because you are now logged in etc.

One way I like to demonstrate this is by organising my post its by the conditional or personalised options they belong to on the flow diagram sheet. This way you can see an instant visual representation of all the features and the instances in which they appear. You can pull them off and stick them on your prototype to show what happens based on user interactions.

Hope this helps!

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